Bysiewicz's 2010 Campaign Writes Her A $76,303 Check

Money Is Reimbursement For Costs She Said She Would Pay Out Of Pocket

May 22, 2011|Jon Lender, Government Watch

The timing was spooky last Wednesday when the state House of Representatives voted 91-51 to approve the so-called Bysiewicz Bill, which would ease the qualifications to serve as Connecticut's attorney general. Exactly a year earlier, on May 18, 2010, the state Supreme Court disqualified Susan Bysiewicz, then secretary of the state, as a Democratic candidate for attorney general.

The pending Bysiewicz Bill is one of a couple of issues that lingered after last year's tumultuous court battle over her qualifications for attorney general.

The issue of the pending bill — which now awaits Senate action — involves the 1897 law that ruined Bysiewicz's hopes last year. The old law was interpreted by the Supreme Court as requiring courtroom litigation experience that Bysiewicz lacked as a lawyer, and Democrats now want to simplify it (or, as Republicans see it, water it down so it's meaningless) to avoid future court challenges of candidates' qualifications.

But here's another issue about which the conclusion has not yet been written: Remember how, when Bysiewicz filed her lawsuit seeking a ruling that she was qualified to run for attorney general, she said she would pay her legal bills out of "my own pocket" instead of with campaign funds?

Well, it turns out she only paid a net total of $20,000 out of $139,979 in legal expenses, campaign financing reports show.

The Friends of Susan, 2010, committee now has reported that it made a $76,303 payment to Bysiewicz this past Jan. 28 as part of the final close-out of its financial affairs.

It is unusual for a campaign committee to make a payment so large to its candidate. The $76,303 payment to Bysiewicz was the committee's largest single disbursement of the entire campaign, a February report shows.

The $76,303 was a reimbursement to Bysiewicz toward payments totaling $96,303 that she had made herself — $35,625 and $60,478 in February and May of 2010 — to the Hartford law firm of Wesley Horton. Horton's firm handled her court case from the Superior Court level, where she won, to the high court, where she lost.

Meanwhile, Horton's firm received an additional payment of $43,676 from Bysiewicz's committee this past January, bringing its total receipts to $139,979 from Bysiewicz and her committee, the reports show.

At this point it's not exactly a surprise that Bysiewicz changed her mind about paying the whole legal bill herself. In January she told The Courant, "I expect to be reimbursed for part of" the Horton bill. But she did not say how much she would be taking, and the amounts have not been reported publicly until now.

Bysiewicz had said in January that she was reconsidering her original statement because she had been quoted an original fee of $20,000 or $30,000 for the case. But then, she said, the Republican Party's intervention in the case to challenge her candidacy drove the price up to nearly $140,000. That same price tag of $140,000, incidentally, is what the GOP has said it paid Eliot Gersten, the lawyer it hired to pursue its ultimately successful challenge.

The figures shown in Bysiewicz's final campaign accounting show that she followed through on what she was saying in January. Her campaign paid $119,979 towards her legal expenses in January — $43,676 directly to Horton, plus the $76,303 payment to Bysiewicz as reimbursement toward what she had paid to Horton previously.

The campaign committee's $119,979 in payments towards Bysiewicz's legal bills represented 27 percent of the committee's total of $438,052 in spending for the whole 2010 campaign.

Even though her campaign's ultimate payment of $119,979 toward her legal expenses hasn't been reported until now, Bysiewicz's current Senate campaign manager, Mark Bergman, Saturday called the matter "old news." That is the same characterization by which Bysiewicz and her people have referred to any of the political problems she had in 2010.

Bergman issued this statement in Bysiewicz's behalf: "This is old news from a two month old report. Susan did not personally pay the costs for the Republicans' partisan antics of jacking up the cost of the lawsuit. As she has said time and time again, this election for the US Senate won't be about what happened to her politically in 2010 but the critical issues that face Connecticut voters. She's going to focus on how we create jobs that keep our children here, how we bring our troops home from Afghanistan immediately, not wait until 2014 and how we produce a new energy policy that focuses on alternative energies. That's what this campaign will be about, not old news."

Besides Bysiewicz, two other prominent Democrats — U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy of the 5th District, and Rep. William Tong, D-Stamford —are seeking their party's 2012 nomination for the Senate seat now held by Joe Lieberman, who is not seeking re-election.

Jon Lender is a reporter on The Courant's investigative desk, with a focus on government and politics. Contact him at jlender@courant.com, 860-241-6524, or c/o The Hartford Courant, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115.